Ireland

British overseas cities on British Overseas Territories and Crown Dependencies are remaining key places of the former far-reaching British Empire, which was a vast holding of many regions, countries, protectorates and territories. A number of notable settlements within England and constituent countries of the grouping from the medieval period onwards were granted city status by British monarchs. This is a honorific title only which grants no additional civic privileges, but it could confer a sense of increased local pride, additional prestige along with international notability and recognition to an area.

Primarily from the 20th century many territories gained independence, and this caused a reduction in the number of cities remaining within the Empire. These overseas lands did not form part of the modern United Kingdom except for Ireland, and later Northern Ireland. Today, the British Overseas Territories and Crown Dependencies remain outside the UK, but the power to designate cities continues to be vested ultimately with the UK government and the present sovereign Charles III, who is also the head of state for these lands. There are (as of 2022) presently four cities in the Overseas Territories, and one on a Crown Dependency.

The Celtic Sea is the area of the Atlantic Ocean off the southern coast of Ireland bounded to the north by Saint George's Channel; other limits include the Bristol Channel, the English Channel, and the Bay of Biscay, as well as adjacent portions of Wales, Cornwall, parts of Devon and Brittany. The continental shelf, which drops away sharply, delimits the southern and western boundaries. The Iroise Sea off Brittany is entirely included within it. The Isles of Scilly are an archipelago of small islands in the sea.

Montserrat (/ˌmɒntsəˈræt/ MONT-sə-RAT, locally /ˈmɒntsəræt/) is a British Overseas Territory in the Caribbean. It is part of the Leeward Islands, the northern portion of the Lesser Antilles chain of the West Indies. Montserrat is about 16 km (10 mi) long and 11 km (7 mi) wide, with roughly 40 km (25 mi) of coastline. It is nicknamed "The Emerald Isle of the Caribbean" both for its resemblance to coastal Ireland and for the Irish ancestry of many of its inhabitants. Montserrat is the only non-fully sovereign full member of the Caribbean Community and the Organisation of Eastern Caribbean States, although it is not the only dependency in the Caribbean.

On 18 July 1995, the previously dormant Soufrière Hills volcano in the southern end of the island became active, and its eruptions destroyed Plymouth, Montserrat's Georgian era capital city situated on the west coast. Between 1995 and 2000, two-thirds of the island's population was forced to flee, mostly to the United Kingdom, leaving fewer than 1,200 people on the island in 1997. (The population had increased to nearly 5,000 by 2016). The volcanic activity continues, mostly affecting the vicinity of Plymouth, including its docks, and the eastern side of the island around the former W. H. Bramble Airport, the remnants of which were buried by flows from further volcanic activity on 11 February 2010.

Belfast (/ˈbɛlfæst/ , BEL-fast, /-fɑːst/, -⁠fahst; from Irish: Béal Feirste [bʲeːlˠ ˈfʲɛɾˠ(ə)ʃtʲə]) is the capital city and principal port of Northern Ireland, standing on the banks of the River Lagan and connected to the open sea through Belfast Lough and the North Channel. It is the second-largest city in Ireland (after Dublin), with an estimated population of 352,390 in 2024, and its metropolitan area has a population of 671,559.

Occupied since at least the Bronze Age, it was chartered as an English settlement in 1613. The town's early growth thereafter was driven by an influx of Scottish Presbyterians. Their descendants' disaffection with Ireland's Anglican establishment contributed to the rebellion of 1798, and to the union with Great Britain in 1800—later regarded as a key to the town's industrial transformation. When granted city status in 1888, Belfast was the world's largest centre of linen manufacture, and by the 1900s her shipyards were building up to a quarter of total United Kingdom tonnage.

The Royal and Parliamentary Titles Act 1927 (17 & 18 Geo. 5. c. 4) was an act of the Parliament of the United Kingdom that authorised the alteration of the British monarch's royal style and titles, and altered the formal name of the British Parliament and hence of the state, in recognition of most of Ireland separating from the United Kingdom as the Irish Free State. It received royal assent on 12 April 1927.

Irish (Standard Irish: Gaeilge), also known as Irish Gaelic or simply Gaelic (/ˈɡeɪlɪk/ GAY-lik), is a Celtic language of the Indo-European language family that belongs to the Goidelic languages and further to Insular Celtic, and is indigenous to the island of Ireland. It was the majority of the population's first language until the 19th century, when English gradually became dominant, particularly in the last decades of the century, in what is sometimes characterised as a result of linguistic imperialism.

Today, Irish is still commonly spoken as a first language in Ireland's Gaeltacht regions, in which 2% of Ireland's population lived in 2022.

Éire (English: /ˈɛərə/ AIR-ə, Irish: [ˈeːɾʲə] ) is the Irish language name for "Ireland". Like its English counterpart, the term Éire is used for both the island of Ireland and the Republic of Ireland, the sovereign state that governs 85% of the island's landmass. The latter is distinct from Northern Ireland (Tuaisceart Éireann in the Irish language), which covers the remainder of the northeast of the island. The same name is also sometimes used in English, with or without the síneadh fada accent, though such use is considered controversial.

Dublin is the capital and largest city of Ireland. Situated on Dublin Bay at the mouth of the River Liffey, it is in the province of Leinster, and is bordered on the south by the Dublin Mountains, part of the Wicklow Mountains range. Dublin is the largest city by population on the island of Ireland; at the 2022 census, the city council area had a population of 592,713, while the city including suburbs had a population of 1,263,219, County Dublin had a population of 1,501,500. Various definitions of a metropolitan Greater Dublin Area exist.

A settlement was established in the area by the Gaels during or before the 7th century, followed by the Vikings. As the Kingdom of Dublin grew, it became Ireland's principal settlement by the 12th century Anglo-Norman invasion of Ireland. Dublin expanded rapidly from the 17th century and was briefly the second largest in the British Empire and sixth largest in Western Europe after the Acts of Union in 1800. Following independence in 1922, Dublin became the capital of the Irish Free State, renamed Ireland in 1937. As of 2018, Dublin was listed by the Globalization and World Cities Research Network (GaWC) as a global city, with a ranking of "Alpha minus", which placed it among the top thirty cities in the world.

Plantations in 16th- and 17th-century Ireland (Irish: Plandálacha na hÉireann) involved the confiscation of Irish-owned land by the English Crown and the colonisation of this land with settlers from Great Britain.

The main plantations took place from the 1550s to the 1620s, the biggest of which was the plantation of Ulster. The plantations led to the founding of many towns, massive demographic, cultural and economic changes, changes in land ownership and the landscape, and also to centuries of ethnic and sectarian conflict.

The siege of Smerwick took place at Ard na Caithne (the Hill of the Arbutus Tree, known in English as Smerwick) in November 1580, during the Second Desmond Rebellion in Ireland. A force of between 400 and 700 Papal freelance soldiers, mostly of Spanish and Italian origin, landed at Smerwick to support the Catholic rebels. They were forced to retreat to the nearby promontory fort of Dún an Óir, where they were besieged by the English. The Papal commander parleyed and was bribed, and the defenders surrendered within a few days. The officers were spared, but the other ranks were then summarily executed on the orders of the English commander, Arthur Grey (Baron Grey de Wilton), the Lord Deputy of Ireland.